Today I leave for Tanzania. I will be embarking on my Five Talents Fellowship and this blog will serve as a record of that experience. Five Talents is the microfinance initiative of the Anglican Church. It provides loans and business skills training in 10 countries around the world. I will be working with one of their newest microfinance partners, the Mama Bahati Foundation in Iringa, Tanzania to support their business skills training programme for new entrepreneurs.
In considering my near future, I have been mentally revisiting the last time I lived and worked overseas as a missionary with the Episcopal Church in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. I have been reading my old missionary journals as well as the email updates that I sent back to my supporters at home. In remembering the people I met and worked with then, and the joys and struggles of their lives, I am moved and encouraged even now, two years later.
So with this blog, I hope to renew the practice of noticing and communicating the ways that I see God’s redemptive plan at work in the lives of individual people. What will this look like? Stories—practical stories of the people that I meet and how their lives are being positively changed. Microfinance is nothing if not this: a very practical way for individuals to change their own circumstances through taking on small scale loans and training.
I hope their stories will be a source of hope that change can and does happen in real and practical ways.
